With the continuing development of medical imaging technologies, the file sizes of recorded image datasets are becoming larger and larger and the number of recorded image datasets is increasing all the time. For archiving, storage and/or diagnostic purposes it is necessary to transport said image datasets, comprising several hundred images of a series of an examination, for example, via communications links from one computing device to another computing device. The term “computing device”, in the context of the present application, is to be understood in a broad sense, encompassing both communication-capable control devices and conventional desktop computers for example.
The DICOM (digital imaging and communications in medicine) standard has meanwhile become widely established in the medical domain as a standard for the file formats and also for the data transmission. It is therefore standard practice to transmit image datasets by means of the DICOM transmission protocol from a first computing device to a second computing device. Of course, other transmission protocols, possibly even proprietary transmission protocols, tailored to the special format and size of the image datasets are also known. The DICOM protocol and where applicable other similar transmission protocols are geared to the specific needs arising for the transmission of medical image datasets.
There is, however, a problem in that the communications link itself is not optimized for the specific profile of medical data that is to be transmitted between two computing devices, which means that it is not possible to achieve an optimal transmission performance. This is particularly relevant since for specific communication parameters the transmission performance is also dependent on the type of target system or, as the case may be, target computing device. Medical systems having a plurality of computing devices that are used for managing and/or processing images, for example radiology information systems (RIS) or hospital information systems (HIS), are in this case frequently highly heterogeneous systems that comprise computing devices of the most disparate types and from the widest variety of manufacturers, for example in imaging devices for different modalities from different manufacturers, but also in terms of an archive server (PACS), for example. It can happen, for example, that a first computing device is embodied for setting up communications links for the purpose of transmitting medical image datasets to between three and thirty second computing devices, all of which can have different specifications. An example of a possible system architecture can be found in US 2009/0091765 A1, the entire contents of which are hereby incorporated herein by reference.
These days it is generally accepted practice to use a standard configuration for all communications links to and from a computing device. This configuration is mostly inherited as a manufacturer setup. It is, however, also known to have the configuration modified by a service technician in a complicated and time-consuming manual procedure. Ultimately, however, what one is left with in most cases is a suboptimal configuration which does not permit optimum transmission performance and consequently slows down the data transmission too much and ties up I/O resources of the computing devices.